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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Count Dracula seems to have a habit of always being
reborn, both within the stories themselves as well as in different incarnations
across the board of entertainment media. He’s become so synonymous with horror
and Halloween that he will never leave the public consciousness. You can kill
him off with a wooden stake or by overexposing him with so many variations,
adaptations, tie-ins, or spin-offs, but he’s never going away; he’ll always be
reborn. And why shouldn’t he? Like most great ideas, there always seems to be
plenty more to explore. I wonder if Bram
Stoker knew just how immortal his creation would turn out to be and that
killing him off at the end of the novel was only the beginning.

Much like Hammer’s Dracula
films, the Spanish horror film The
Dracula Saga/ La saga de los Drácula is a take that explores further possibilities with The Count. With
a stretch of the imagination, it kind of works as an unofficial prequel to Stoker'sDracula, but it’s rather more of an alteration of sorts that disregards the
events of the original story and takes liberties to imagine what Dracula’s
family would be like, with a story told primarily through Dracula’s estranged
granddaughter, Berta (Tina Sáinz – I could’ve easily seen Emma Cohen in this role as well). Although there are narrations from Dracula at the beginning and at the end, telling the story at the endas if it was his story all along, while the English trailer is narrated by Berta, who claims this is her story, so it's a bit of a toss up as to whose story this really is.